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Watch, Read & Listen: OSAI at Home Guest Artists

As the start of OSAI at Home creeps closer and closer, check out our recommended reading, watching, and listening for students to familiarize themselves with two of our incredible 2020 guest artists!

Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on 524 stations across the nation and downloaded more than 9 million times a month as a podcast. Abumrad employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what's been called "a new aesthetic" in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews and sound effects into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the legal foundation for the war on terror. In 2010, Radiolab was awarded the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award, and in 2011 Abumrad was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant).

Abumrad will join our students live for an extraordinary lecture on creative process, entitled The Miracle of Indoor Plumbing.

Misty Copeland was raised in San Pedro, California and began her ballet studies at the age of thirteen. She studied at the San Francisco Ballet School and American Ballet Theatre's Summer Intensive. In 2015, Misty was promoted to principal dancer, making her the first Black woman to ever be promoted to the position at ABT. Groundbreaking debuts for Misty have been Firebird, "Clara" in ABT's The Nutcracker, the first Black woman to perform the lead role of "Odette/Odile" in ABT's Swan Lake, as well as "Juliet" in Romeo & Juliet, Giselle, "Kitri" in Don Quixote, Manon, and "Aurora" in The Sleeping Beauty. Misty is the author of two successful New York Times bestselling books: Life in Motion and Ballerina Body, as well as the award-winning children's book Firebird.

Copeland will be chatting with our student body via Zoom on their first day of classes.

"This week, we're throwing it back to an old favorite: a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one famously repetitive piece of music.

"Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad car accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings involving strawberries, and then ... ‘Bolero.’

"At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She called it ‘Unraveling Bolero.’ But at the time, she had no idea that both she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with this odd piece of music. Arbie Orenstein tells us what happened to Ravel after he wrote ‘Bolero,’ and neurologist Bruce Miller helps us understand how, for both Anne and Ravel, ‘Bolero’ might have been the first symptom of a deadly disease."

"Our world is saturated in color, from soft hues to violent stains. How does something so intangible pack such a visceral punch? This hour, in the name of science and poetry, Jad and Robert tear the rainbow to pieces.

"To what extent is color a physical thing in the physical world, and to what extent is it created in our minds? We start with Sir Isaac Newton, who was so eager to solve this very mystery, he stuck a knife in his eye to pinpoint the answer. Then, we meet a sea creature that sees a rainbow way beyond anything humans can experience, and we track down a woman who we're pretty sure can see thousands (maybe even millions) more colors than the rest of us. And we end with an age-old question, that, it turns out, never even occurred to most humans until very recently: why is the sky blue?"

"It's almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But this hour, we try to do just that.

"We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago."

"Ballet star and history-maker Misty Copeland sits down with Gwyneth Paltrow to talk about what it's like being the first African American woman to ever be promoted to principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre."